At TechCrunch, Jolla's CEO Marc Dillon explains why his company will focus on China, Finland, and the rest of Europe first, ignoring the US. "The US market is not on the radar as yet, as he says the patent landscape there 'raises a barrier' of entry to newcomers (he's especially critical of overly aggressive use of design patents)." Considering the patent mess in the US is only getting worse, expect to see more of this in the future. Jolla is making a wise decision by ignoring the US - as a young technology company, you're far better off focusing your attention elsewhere.

Fairly. I left school in 1990. No one taught us imperial directly. Any imperial we knew was either via our parents or from the fact that society in general was still using Imperial.

Because I used to watch a lot of English tv and only recently have I noticed metric units popping up, which each time surprises me.

I think it depends on the people depicted. Older generation (45+) still learnt the old system mainly. They tend to also be stubborn about the situation. We always used Metric because it's a heck of a lot simpler. Do you know how many Chains there are in a Furlong? Me neither.

To me it seemed imperial (thanks for the correction) was always the primary system of the English and metric a very recent alternate.

Yes. But in schools, it was pushed hard. I think it was originally because of the European directive, but it was also seen as an advantage to move away from the completely random and chaotic past systems.

People tend to know feet and inches (12 inches = 1 foot, but not how many feet there are in a mile, for example? No idea), probably have a vague understanding of pounds and ounces (apparently, 16 Ounces to 1 pound - I had to look that one up! But even on TV, it's normally grammes and kilos and we never, ever use fluid ounces like the US, always Litres and Millilitres or "pints".) And like I said, personal weight is always in stones and pounds(14 pounds = 1 stone.)

But I imagine a lot of books and documentation and as mentioned your parents, The Elders and a large part of society in general work with imperial. Doesn't that become confusing at times?

No, because any book produced since the late 70's has either both Metric and Imperial, or just Metric. As a test, I just looked at 4 or 5 cookery books in the Kitchen. All of them give the Metric first, 2 out of the five don't give the Imperial at all. All canned/bagged/bottled products only give metric (and many are designed to be "European" with the ingredients/contents written in a number of languages.) The only products we tend to get Imperial style units on now are designed for the US market as well (and their weights and measures are similarly named, but not exactly the same on all counts!)

I've read up on ancient units and it was interesting to learn that the value of these units could differ from city and region and of course they were redefined a few times during history.

I guess it's kind of like Switzerland speaking 4 different languages, etc. In the UK we have 3 Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish in parts of Northern Ireland and Gaelic in Scotland, and well, one more if you count revived Cornish) as well as English, but they are very specific to regions. But England is very monolingual. We don't really understand how speaking so many regional languages works.

Even in our small county of The Netherlands different cities had different times (not zones, actual cities using different times) and our German neighbors set that straight during the WW2 occupation.

Railways had long fixed that for the UK.

It's almost odd something like the metric system wasn't introduced earlier.